Russell Jackson

The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare on film

Introduction: Shakespeare, films and the marketplace Russell Jackson Part I. Adaptation and its Contexts: 1. From play-script to screenplay Russell Jackson 2. Video and its paradoxes Michele Willems 3. Critical junctures in Shakespeare screen history: the case of Richard III Barbara Freedman 4. Shakespeare and movie genre: the case of Hamlet Harry Keyishian Part II. Genres and Plays: 5. The comedies on film Michael Hattaway 6. Filming Shakespeares history: three films of Richard III H. R. Coursen 7. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on film J. Lawrence Guntner 8. The tragedies of love on film Patricia Tatspaugh Part III. Directors: 9. The Shakespeare films of Laurence Olivier Anthony Davies 10. Orson Welles and filmed Shakespeare Pamela Mason 11. Grigori Kozintsevs Hamlet and King Lear Mark Sokolyansky 12. Franco Zeffirelli and Shakespeare Deborah Cartmell 13. Flamboyant realist: Kenneth Branagh Samuel Crowl Part IV. Critical Issues: 14. Looking at Shakespeares women on film Carol Chillington Rutter 15. National and racial stereotypes in Shakespeare films Neil Taylor 16. Shakespeare the illusionist: filming the supernatural Neil Forsyth 17. Shakespeares cinematic offshoots Tony Howard Further reading Filmography.

Shakespeare in Gdańsk, August 2006

Between 2 and 12 August 2006, the Polish city of Gdańsk hosted its tenth annual Shakespeare Festival, presenting eleven professional productions from seven countries, supported by educational programs, guest lectures, exhibitions, art shows, and student performances. The Theatrum Gedanense Foundation, of which Jerzy Limón is president, was founded in 1990 to enable the reconstruction of an Elizabethan theater used by English traveling companies (among others) during the seventeenth century. The aim is not merely to recreate a historic playing space, but to enliven the cultural life of this great international city, a Hanseatic port which in its time has been the victim of tragic circumstances, most notably the destruction of most of its city center at the end of the Second World War. But Gdańsk, which was also the birthplace of the movement that led to the fall of the postwar Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, has always been a city of intellectual and artistic, as well as economic, commerce. As part of the celebrations of the tenth festival, sponsorship for a number of prizes was secured, and an international jury was appointed to award them. Deliberating on the relative merits of such a diverse program, with enormous variations in approach not merely to the Shakespeare texts but to theater itself, concentrated the mind on the validity or viability of “international” or “global” Shakespeare. These productions were not “at home” in Gdańsk; instead, the companies brought their audiences to their own homes, and to their own conflicts, anxieties, and pleasures. On a less-exalted but nonetheless important level, the festival showed the possibilities of the Shakespearean material, even when (as with the Munich Kammerspiele Othello) they seemed at first to take issue with it, if not attack it. The productions included the crowd-pleasing and the crowd-puzzling, intense and extravagant, somber and extroverted. Some productions had been seen elsewhere and more than once, or were firmly established in their theater’s repertoire, while others were newly created. The venues included two large theaters in Gdańsk, one of them the Baltic Opera, built for musical theater; smaller studio theaters; a partially restored church in the city center; and the Music Theatre in the neighboring industrial city of Gdynia, so that a diversity of spaces and locations were available. This was very much a festival for the “three cities” of this part